I like to think that this primitive quality in H. D.’s poetry comes from the fact that she is an American. There can be no doubt that we are an uncultivated, a barbarous people. Our ancestors, by migrating to an immense and utterly undeveloped continent, without traditions, were thrown face to face with nature and lost, in consequence, nearly all feeling for their previous culture. If you take a child of civilized parents and bring him up among savages, he will revert to savagery, and in the same way our forefathers, as soon as they ceased to cling to the Atlantic seaboard, changed, through contact with the immense wilderness of the interior, not only mentally but physically. For example, Washington was physically and mentally an English squire of his period: Lincoln, about a hundred years later, was, in appearance and habits of thought, like a man of another race. The Indian, although conquered, gave to his conquerors the Indian way of thinking; or rather the Indian’s surroundings—the endless forest—produced in the newcomers’ minds something of the same way of thinking as the Indian had before their coming. What a pity it has been for art that we, as a nation, did not admit without shame this return to nature! But instead, we were ashamed of our barbarism, and we have striven and are still striving to outdo Europe on its own grounds, with the result that so much of our art seems merely transplanted, exotic, and false. We might have been the Russians of the western hemisphere; instead of that we were almost the provincial English. Instead of Fenimore Cooper and _The Song of Hiawatha_, we might have given to the world a new national epic. But the opportunity is now lost and whatever fragments of that epic may be written will have to be very sophisticated and in a sense artificial products. To make an end of this long digression, I can truly say that I find nothing transplanted in H. D.’s poetry. She has borrowed a few names of gods from the early Greek, but that was because she found herself in complete sympathy with this people, who, if we are to believe the modern school of archaeology, were quite as barbarian themselves in the Homeric period as the Red Indians, and who lived in the closest contact with nature. Let us take an early example: Hermes of the Ways The hard sand breaks, And the grains of it Are clear as wine. Far off over the leagues of it, The wind, Playing on the wide shore, Piles little ridges, And the great waves Break over it. But more than the many-foamed ways Of the sea, I know him Of the triple path-ways, Hermes, Who awaiteth. Dubious, Facing three ways, Welcoming wayfarers, He whom the sea-orchard Shelters from the west, From the east, Weathers sea-wind: Fronts the great dunes.